Technology roadmapping – part 1
Last year, two exceptionally interesting articles devoted to technology roadmaps were published in the Polish magazine Production Manager. The main author of both texts is Dr. Sergey Yatsunenko. The texts deserve wider dissemination, which is why we would like to introduce them to the TRIZ community. Specially for MATRIZ blog, Dr. Yatsunenko prepared their English version. Today we present the first article, originally published here. The next one will follow soon.
Technology roadmaps…
… from reactive planning to designing the technological future
When owning a breakthrough technology isn’t enough
In an era of rapid technological development and intense global competition, the ability to intentionally create the technological future is becoming the most important differentiating factor in the market. As McKinsey Global Institute demonstrates in its Technology Trends Outlook reports [1], the pace of new technology introduction has increased tenfold over the past hundred years, and 70% of managers admit that traditional strategic planning methods are no longer sufficient in today’s dynamic business environment.
The data in these reports is quite unambiguous – companies using Technology Roadmaps (TRM) achieve on average 40% higher innovation success rates than competitors relying solely on classical strategic planning, experience, and managerial intuition [1].
In 1987, two chemists at Eastman Kodak laboratories – Ching W. Tang and Steven Van Slyke – created the first functional prototype of an Organic Light-Emitting Diode (OLED) display. Sixteen years later, Samsung introduced the first commercial Active Matrix Organic Light-Emitting Diode (AMOLED) screen and began its journey toward controlling 85% of the global premium display market.
Why did Samsung, not the original inventor, achieve spectacular market success?
This question strikes at the heart of what separates companies that shape technological futures from those that merely possess breakthrough technologies. The answer lies not in resources, talent, or even timing – but in a systematic approach to technological development that has been refined over four decades: Technology Roadmapping.
The Kodak paradox
Kodak’s position in 1987 was enviable. They held the OLED technology, had world-class research facilities, and enjoyed a 16-year head start – an eternity in technology terms. Yet their first commercial OLED product, the EasyShare LS633 with a modest 2.2-inch screen, appeared only in 2003, the same year Samsung launched its AMOLED revolution.
What went wrong?
Kodak chose White Organic Light-Emitting Diode (WOLED) technology – a solution where diodes emit white light that is then filtered to obtain colors, as opposed to direct Red-Green-Blue (RGB) emission. This decision proved to be a technological dead end. While competitors invested in RGB solutions offering superior image quality and energy efficiency, Kodak was stuck with a less efficient technology. They opted for licensing revenue instead of building manufacturing capabilities, surrendering control over market development. Most critically, OLED remained a niche curiosity, never integrated into Kodak’s core business strategy. And they underestimated how quickly the consumer electronics industry would adapt new display technologies, losing market momentum.
But this wasn’t an isolated misstep. The pattern runs deeper.
In 1975, Kodak engineer Steve Sasson built the world’s first digital camera – a 3.6 kg device capturing 0.01 megapixel black-and-white images onto a cassette tape in 23 seconds. When he presented it to management in 1976, the response was predictable: “That’s fascinating, but don’t tell anyone about it.” The fear of cannibalizing film sales – their cash cow – paralyzed strategic thinking.
While Kodak suppressed its own invention, Sony, Canon, and Nikon invested heavily in the technology Kodak had created and ignored. By 2000, Kodak had lost market dominance. By 2012, they filed for bankruptcy.
The most ironic detail emerged only after the collapse: for over 30 years, from 1974 to 2007, Kodak operated a small nuclear reactor in a bunker beneath their Rochester facility, containing 1.6 kg of weapons-grade enriched uranium – the same material used to produce nuclear weapons. A nuclear reactor in the laboratory, bankruptcy in the marketplace – it’s hard to imagine a more dramatic illustration of what happens when technological capability exists without strategic integration.
Samsung’s methodical march
Samsung approached OLED commercialization with a fundamentally different philosophy. When they introduced the first AMOLED display in 2003, they weren’t just launching a product – they were executing a two-decade trajectory.
The pioneering phase from 2003 to 2009 focused on building technological foundations through massive R&D investment while testing the technology in real market conditions through limited deployments in mobile devices. During the expansion phase from 2010 to 2012, the introduction of Super AMOLED marked the transition to mass production, achieving scale that drove down unit costs while systematically improving quality.
The form innovation phase from 2013 to 2017 opened entirely new product categories. The Galaxy Round in 2013 featured the first curved display, demonstrating capabilities unique to OLED technology and opening a new era in mobile device design. Then came the strategic triumph in 2018: Apple replaced Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) technology with OLED panels in its iPhones — sourced from Samsung. The biggest competitor became a key customer.
The form revolution continues. The Galaxy Fold in 2019 and fourth-generation Quantum Dot OLED (QD-OLED) with impressive 4000 nits brightness in 2024 keeps establishing new quality standards.
What Samsung demonstrated is a phenomenon rare in business: transforming your greatest competitor into a customer who funds your continued dominance. Apple, despite enormous financial and technological resources, couldn’t match Samsung’s display manufacturing and started paying for the competitor’s solution. This situation perfectly illustrates how effective long-term technological planning can lead to building an exceptionally strong market position – Samsung not only dominated the OLED display market but also created a situation where its success is partially funded from its main rival’s pocket.
What Technology Roadmaps actually are
Samsung didn’t succeed by accident. They applied a methodology that has enabled leading corporations to transform technological innovations into market dominance for over four decades. Technology Roadmaps are much more than just a planning tool – they are a systematic way of thinking about the future that allows companies to move from reactively responding to changes to proactively designing technological development.
Robert Phaal from the University of Cambridge, a pioneer of modern TRM methodology, defines Technology Roadmaps as “a structured and often graphical method of exploring and communicating relationships between evolving markets, products, and technologies over time” [2].
Figure 1. Roadmapping for strategy and innovation. Source: [2].
Unlike traditional strategic planning, which typically extrapolates current trends, TRM models entirely new technological possibilities and their impact on future markets. Where classical approaches ask “how do we develop what we have?”, Technology Roadmaps pose a different question: “how do we create what doesn’t yet exist, but the market will need?”
The methodology rests on three interconnected layers bound by a time axis [2]. The Purpose Layer addresses “know-why” – the evolution of customer needs, market trends, and strategic objectives, not just current ones but those emerging over five to ten years. The Delivery Layer addresses “know-what” – the products, services, or systems that deliver value, serving as the critical intermediary between organizational goals and available resources. The Resources Layer addresses “know-how” and “know-when” – the technologies, competencies, and knowledge required to realize planned products.
A key innovation of TRM methodology is the inclusion of the temporal dimension. Roadmaps are not static documents but dynamic representations of technological evolution that show the synchronization of various technical system elements over time.
This multi-layered structure integrates what traditional planning often treats separately: market pull and technology push. The market-driven approach uses market needs analysis as the starting point for identifying required technologies. The technology-driven approach explores technological possibilities in search of new solutions and their market applications. TRM combines both perspectives, creating a balance between what the market wants and what technology can deliver.
Samsung’s example perfectly illustrates this integration. The company didn’t limit itself to satisfying existing market needs – they used OLED’s capabilities to create entirely new product categories. Foldable Galaxy Fold displays are an example of a product nobody needed – until Samsung showed it could exist.
From workshops to transformation
The T-Plan methodology developed by Phaal’s team at Cambridge offers a practical approach to rapid TRM implementation through four focused workshops [2]. The first stage examines market and business context, identifying drivers, trends, and customer requirements through Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis and gap identification between current capabilities and future needs. The second stage translates market requirements into product concepts using Quality Function Deployment (QFD) matrices to map customer needs to product functionalities. The third stage identifies technological solutions, distinguishing between available technologies (green), those requiring development (yellow), and fundamentally new ones (red). The fourth stage integrates all layers into a coherent temporal map, identifying critical decision points and dependencies between projects.
Phaal and his team identified eight main types of roadmaps according to their application purpose [2]. Product planning is the most common type, linking technologies with product generations – Philips uses this method to synchronize display technology development with television introduction cycles. Strategic planning maps long-term opportunities and threats at the business level – the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) uses its 14 industry roadmaps developed through 2030 to distribute investments according to Technology Readiness Levels (TRL): 70% of funds go to TRL 7-9 technologies (ready for commercialization), 20% to TRL 4-6 (development stage), and 10% to TRL 1-3 (fundamental research). Long-term planning forecasts sectoral or national development – the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) publishes the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS), which guides the entire semiconductor industry’s development [3]. Knowledge management maps intellectual resources and competencies – the University of Edinburgh developed maps linking knowledge assets to business objectives.
But the real power of roadmapping extends beyond planning mechanics. It transforms organizational culture.
Technology Roadmaps don’t function in isolation. Their true power is revealed through integration with other management systems. Sopheon built an entire innovation management system based on roadmaps, using the Accolade Vision Strategist platform to create interactive maps and visualize multidimensional relationships between technological investments and market opportunities. Integration with project portfolio management allows organizations to allocate resources according to strategic priorities. Synchronization with budget cycles enables translating strategic technology plans into specific financial allocations. Coordination with risk management allows identifying critical dependencies and uncertainty points.
The process forces a shift from siloed thinking to cross-functional integration. Technical teams, marketing, and strategy begin using the same concepts and temporal perspectives – a shared strategic language. Engineers working on specific technologies understand how their efforts impact future products and markets – systems thinking. Organizations move from reactive problem-solving to proactive future design – long-term perspective.
The UK Foresight Vehicle initiative demonstrated this at sector scale, bringing together 130 participants from 60 organizations to create a shared vision for road transport’s future using the T-Plan method [2]. The resulting roadmap didn’t just forecast alternative fuel technology development – it coordinated research, regulatory, and investment efforts across an entire sector, showing how fuel cell technology could gradually replace internal combustion engines, identifying key transition phases and necessary infrastructure investments.
The SIA went further with the ITRS, a document that has guided electronic industry development for over two decades, forecasting technological requirements 15 years ahead and coordinating global research and investment efforts of companies like Intel, Samsung, TSMC, and GlobalFoundries [3].
When roadmapping works – and when it doesn’t
- Technology Roadmaps aren’t a universal solution. They deliver results only under specific organizational and strategic conditions.
- The organization must have technological ambitions and a long-term perspective – a readiness to invest months of intensive team effort for results that materialize over five to ten years. Organizations focused solely on short-term efficiency won’t achieve the expected return from this tool. Active R&D work or collaboration with research centers is essential; without it, roadmapping becomes a purely academic exercise with no practical business impact. Organizational maturity matters too – developed strategic planning processes, project management, and technology intelligence must exist for roadmaps to integrate with actual management processes and ensure practical application of results.
- Roadmapping fails in crisis situations where short-term survival dominates, in industries with product lifecycles under two years, and in companies focused solely on production efficiency. For such cases, technology audits for assessing current capabilities, competitor benchmarking for identifying best practices, or traditional project planning for optimizing existing processes prove more appropriate.
- The Korean examples – Samsung, Hyundai-Kia – show that roadmap effectiveness depends directly on three factors: top management support, process development quality, and alignment with company strategy. Only when all conditions are met do roadmaps produce measurable positive impact on organizational performance.
- Research shows that companies achieving the greatest benefits from TRM share five key characteristics [2]: top management engagement where roadmaps serve as strategic tools for key investment and strategic decisions; interdisciplinary collaboration where the most valuable maps emerge from intensive cooperation of teams from different functional areas; iterativeness and continuous improvement where successful companies update their TRM at least annually; integration with business processes where roadmapping influences real resource allocation decisions; and a culture of long-term thinking where organizations are ready to invest in technologies and projects whose returns will come in several years.
The strategic choice
The comparison between Kodak and Samsung delivers a fundamental lesson for any technology-driven organization. Possessing breakthrough technology is just the beginning. The key to success lies in strategic utilization and consistent execution of a long-term technological development vision.
Kodak had all the components needed to create Technology Roadmaps: breakthrough technologies, advanced research laboratories, access to global markets. What was missing was a systematic approach to integrating these elements into a coherent vision of the future. Samsung showed how methodical application of TRM principles can transform even significant technological delay into market dominance.
The difference between these companies lies not in access to technology or financial resources, but in the ability to systematically design the technological future. Technology Roadmaps provide this ability to any organization ready to move from reactive planning to strategic creation of its future.
Technology Roadmaps represent a strategic choice between the comfort of following trends and the challenge of creating technological futures. For organizations with serious innovation ambitions and readiness for long-term investment, it’s a tool that can transform a technology follower into a creator of global technological standards.
The key success condition is readiness to think in terms of technological cycles of 7-10 years and invest in technologies whose commercial potential is not yet obvious to most of the market. It was precisely this approach that allowed Samsung to revolutionize display technologies and Chinese companies to gain leading positions in many high-tech industries.
Technology Roadmaps are a powerful but resource-intensive tool, optimal for large corporations with long planning horizons. However, a significant portion of manufacturing companies need more flexible approaches to technological planning — methodologies delivering practical results within months rather than years, requiring limited resources. Adapting roadmapping principles to the realities of medium and small enterprises, including through integration with other analytical and technological development methodologies, may prove to be the key to achieving this flexibility.
*
About the author:
Dr Sergey Yatsunenko
PhD in physics, combining analytical thinking with a passion for innovation and technology. An expert in intellectual property and patent strategy. TRIZ Master, President and Board Member of MATRIZ. His commitment to market development is evident not only in his strong client relationships but also in his active support for startups, where he shares expertise and provides guidance to emerging businesses.
*
Production Manager
https://production-manager.pl/
A Polish trade magazine focused on manufacturing and production management, aimed primarily at industrial managers and decision-makers. It provides in-depth analysis, trend insights, and practical guidance on modern manufacturing practices, digital transformation, smart technologies, and the management of teams and strategic business development in production companies. The magazine works closely with industry experts and recognized authorities, which gives its content strong professional credibility and supports production leaders in making informed decisions in a rapidly changing industrial environment.
References
- McKinsey Global Institute, Technology Trends Outlook reports:
https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/the-top-trends-in-tech - Phaal, R., Roadmapping for strategy and innovation, University of Cambridge:
https://www.ifm.eng.cam.ac.uk/uploads/Research/CTM/Roadmapping/roadmapping_overview.pdf - International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS), Semiconductor Industry Association:
https://www.semiconductors.org/resources/2015-international-technology-roadmap-for-semiconductors-itrs/ - UK Foresight Vehicle Technology Roadmap:
https://www.ifm.eng.cam.ac.uk/uploads/Research/CTM/Roadmapping/foresight_vehicle_v1.pdf